Volume 1, Number 2
Contents
Greetings from the Writer-in-Chief..............................................................................................1
Civic Catholicism.........................................................................................................................1
Civic Catholicism
States' rights are based on federal limits, on the deference
permitted by States to their federation. For longer than
living memory most Americans have equated federal
government with strong central government. The dual
nature of ‘feder’-stem words goes practically
unquestioned and unchallenged. There is lately a
dangerous global parallel. What used to be the Third
World—and it must be the Second World too—is now by
the drumming of the United Nations (UN) termed
‘developing nations’. The First World is termed
‘developed nations’. The ranking of civilized capacity
and competency, especially by race, something poignantly
obvious in the world's results, has been pushed from the
minds of Westerners, because after all, humanity is one
big, happy family. Motherhood ordains it. To wit, the
West has finished developing, and it is only fair that those
peoples of the world who have been and likely still are
most incompetent are allowed to catch up. Absent some
miraculous transposition of character, the developed are
not estranged with developing, whereas the so-called
developing are.
If the West should stagnate and fall into a second dark
ages, well, it's a small price for the good of humanity.
There is no telling how much farther along humanity
would have been today if Rome had not fallen and the
knowledge housed by the library of Alexandria, Egypt
had not been destroyed. The city that is key to the demise
of the West this time is Washington, if that were
someone's goal. Convince Americans that all-for-one is
virtuous and practical, and the deterioration necessary to
achieve a global common denominator naturally follows.
It is not hard to believe political power naturally
consolidates. It is hard to believe it would not reach
global proportions simply because a global variety is
without precedent.
The American creed of all-for-one idealism is the
Pledge of Allegiance. It's current form of 31 words was
made in 1954, by statutory amendment of the U.S.
© 2009 Douglas Morris All rights reserved.
Verona, Pennsylvania December 2009
Greetings from the Writer-in-Chief
This is the second issue of The Cerebral Freedom. Its
main article is likely a psychological challenge to you,
dear reader, because it is likely a challenge to the
framework of your self-identity. Human beings, that is
self-governing humans, embrace greater psychological
sophistication not psychological stagnation.
Benjamin Franklin opined at the Constitutional
Convention of 1787:
In these sentiments, Sir, I agree to this
Constitution with all its faults, if they are such;
because I think a general Government necessary
for us, and there is no form of Government but
what may be a blessing to the people if well
administered, and believe farther that this is likely
to be well administered for a course of years, and
can only end in Despotism, as other forms have
done before it, when the people shall become so
corrupted as to need despotic Government, being
incapable of any other.
Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1815 about French affairs,
“Instead of that liberty which takes root and growth in
the progress of reason, if recovered by mere force or
accident, it becomes, with an unprepared people, a
tyranny still, of the many, the few, or the one.” (The
two quotes were taken 30 November 2009 from the
U.S. Library of Congress website: Farrand's Records,
vol. 2, page 642 within the “A Century of Lawmaking
for a New Nation” digital collection, and a letter to
Marie Joseph Gilbert dated 14 February 1815 within
“The Thomas Jefferson Papers” digital collection.)
The American chauvinistic mission of spreading
democratic freedom throughout the world is
fundamentally flawed. Most of the world does not
want, appreciate, or deserve it. The smartest two
Founding Fathers might suggest that we attend to
freedom here in the United States.
—Douglas Morris
Page 2 The Cerebral Freedom
Government's flag code. On June 14th of that year, Flag
Day, President Eisenhower signed into law the addition of
‘under God’. ‘In God We Trust’ was to appear on paper
money by law enacted the next year. It was new and
improved group-think inoculation against the atheist
Communists. Any exhilaration from the rebel sons of the
Bible Belt was gravy.
Federal stewardship of the Pledge began 22 June 1942,
in the heat of World War II, with enactment of the first
federal flag code. The legal battles over indoctrination of
school children with the Pledge goes back even further.
At issue has been the constitutionality of the Pledge vis-à-
vis the First Amendment's guarantee of mental freedom
via a free market of thought throughout a hodgepodge of
media (religion, speech, press, assembly, petition). The
motto ‘In God We Trust’ was first used on U.S. coins
during the Civil War and U.S. paper money in 1957. The
phrases ‘Liberty’ and ‘E Pluribus Unum’ appeared on
early U.S. coins.
The original Pledge, of 23 words, was written by
Francis Bellamy (1855–1931) in 1892: “I pledge
allegiance to my Flag and to the Republic for which it
stands—one Nation indivisible—with Liberty and Justice
for all.” You may surmise he was not a Founding Father.
What you can't surmise is that he was a nearly middle-
aged Christian Socialist longing for the Civil War
patriotism of his youth, like many of his generation, and
that generation was roughly in its political prime.
If we go back to first principles of American
government, we must go back to the ‘organic laws’ that
started it all: Declaration of Independence (1776), Articles
of Confederation (1777), Northwest Ordinance (1787),
and the Constitution of the United States (1787). The
Constitution of the United States of America was created
in 1787 and instituted illegally in 1789. The famous
preamble speaks of ‘a more perfect Union’. According to
the Articles of Confederation, the United States was a
‘perpetual Union’ subject to terms that could not be
altered without unanimous agreement by every member
State. Travel was costly and time consuming. Commerce
was encumbered by the supremacy and disunity of local
and State interests. Britain and Spain had designs on
North America that might not be survived. The illegality
of the new constitution was justified to intelligent minds
by the facts of life. Stupid men, though equal according
to the Declaration of Independence, and stupid women,
here mentioned for the sake of equality, were not yet
making political decisions as equals, or the ‘country’
would have been moribund and soon failed.
Truth conveys its own context, and principles are
context sensitive. Philosophy is not whimsical; it is
critical, and I bring your attention to its application.
Consider this timeless excerpt from the Declaration,
written by Thomas Jefferson:
Volume 1, Number 2
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men
are created equal, that they are endowed by their
Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among
these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
That to secure these rights, Governments are
instituted among Men, deriving their just powers
from the consent of the governed,—That whenever
any Form of Government becomes destructive of
these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to
abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying
its foundation on such principles and organizing its
powers in such form, as to them shall seem most
likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long
established should not be changed for light and
transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath
shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer,
while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by
abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.
But when a long train of abuses and usurpations,
pursing to invariably the same Object evinces a
design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is
their right, it is their duty, to throw off such
Government, and to provide new Guards for their
future security.
Being ill-disposed to suffer at the hands of customary
governance is the sublime essence of being American.
Allow me to elaborate by defining generic categories of
societal sophistication. Some peoples of the world
operate along the lines of heredity as tribal savages, any
tender moments notwithstanding; they are the Third
World. The feral freedoms of the early Stone Age are
long gone because of population density and limited
resources. Some people are more sophisticated and
follow a doctrine of abstract principles that permit social
structures grander that tribal ones; they maintain and
operate a pyramidal monolith of a society in top down
fashion as barbarians, any intellectual advances
notwithstanding; they are the Second World. What
British-variety peoples did was reverse the political flow
into a bottom up fashion. Self-governing peoples are the
most sophisticated, responsible, and since prehistoric feral
times the most free; they have been only Western and
Westernized nations; they were the First World.
Spreading communism in the 1950s was a positive step
for societies that had never placed cultural value on the
mass consideration of social design, however flawed the
communist logic may have been. I believe Karl Marx had
it backward: communism naturally evolves into
capitalism because accountability requires money.
We could suppose how the social structure of a generic
First World society compares to the pyramidal layering of
the Second World. Healthy democracy may tend to peak
or flatten the pyramid by advancing individual merit but
December 2009 The Cerebral Freedom
must slough its antiquated bottom and raise the whole.
Certainly, the ground floor of the First World is
comparatively posh to that of the Second. Now
reconsider the previous excerpt, and imagine if Jefferson
had written, “all men of sophistication adequate for self-
government within life's natural and man's liberated
circumstances are politically equal, that they are endowed
by their Creator with the right stuff permissive of Life,
Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness, had simply by
exercising membership in a democratic citizenship with
capable others.”
A worthwhile American value is certainly not that all
men, or people, are created truly equal. If that were the
case, taxpayer-funded sex change operations for
municipal employees would not be policy in Freakland,
USA. Are murderers, swindlers, and other incorrigible
types endowed by God with the familiar unalienable
rights? If so, we should not have jails. Are people
incapable of First World stewardship deserving of First
World citizenship or benefits? If so, there would not be a
Third World filled mostly with individuals too inept for
self-governance. Thomas Jefferson, who was smarter
than you and me put together, undoubtedly knew all men
were not created equal. He left out the conditional
boilerplate. The essential point is that rights of liberty are
by definition not from the state but to the state. The
Founding Fathers were capable politicians, or they would
not be known as founders of anything. Jefferson's
unalienable rights were revolutionary for the accuracy of
his expression, but writing a political document intended
for public scrutiny led him, I expect, to admix grand
imprecision for politics' sake.
Doctrines of obedience have been used to solidify states
(nations, empires, etc.) since ancient times. Classic
examples are the Nicene Creed (325) and the
Constantinopolitan Creed (381), created to define
orthodox belief in the Roman Empire. The clarity of
religious thought is admirable, but the political
application is another matter. Orthodox belief in
obedience, politically speaking, is a Second World
mechanism. The Roman Senate was inference to
something better two thousand years ago. Citizenry of
sophistication adequate for democracy does not develop
overnight.
The principal dispute among the Founding Fathers was
Jeffersonianism versus Hamiltonanism. Hamiltonianism
was a recipe for total subjugation, and Jefferson knew it.
The latter Whigs and the first remade Republicans recast
the political contention against ‘federal’ subjugation as a
delusional defense of State slavery, paranoid before the
Emancipation Proclamation and immoral thereafter.
Republicans—à la Saul D. Alinsky's 13th rule of power
tactics—labeled political dissenters as ‘Copperheads’.
With Lincoln in power hundreds of newspapers were shut
Page 3
down, all telegraph usage was censored, thousands to
include federal judges and a congressman were arrested
and detained without just cause (without writ of habeas
corpus), and Americans were coerced to swear loyalty
oaths (the wording of which I have not discovered).
Abraham Lincoln and his Radical Republicans ushered in
both Alexander Hamilton's dream and Thomas Jefferson's
nightmare, reaching a first climax with the Gilded Age.
The issue was State sovereignty. It still is.
Lincoln's first inaugural address is well worth your
reading. It's available online. An authoritative transcript
in the public domain is available from the “Century of
Lawmaking” digital collection from the website of the
U.S. Library of Congress, in The Congressional Globe, 4
March 1861, pages 1433–1435. Consider the following
excerpts kept in order:
Apprehension seems to exist among the people of the
southern States, that by the accession of a Republican
Administration their property and their peace and
personal security are to be endangered. There has
never been any reasonable cause for such
apprehension. Indeed, the most ample evidence to
the contrary has all the while existed, and been open
to their inspection. It is found in nearly all the public
speeches of him who now addresses you. I do but
quote from one of those speeches, when I declare
that—
“I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to
interfere with the institution of slavery in the States
where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do
so, and I have no inclination to do so.”
I hold that, in contemplation of universal law, and of
the Constitution, the Union of these States is
perpetual. Perpetuity is implied, if not expressed, in
the fundamental law of all national Governments.
It follows from these views that no State, upon its
own mere motion, can lawfully get out of the Union;
that resolves and ordinances to that effect are legally
void; and that acts of violence, within any State or
States, are insurrectionary or revolutionary,
according to circumstances.
The power confided to me will be used to hold,
occupy, and possess the property and places
belonging to the Government, and to collect the
duties and imposts; but beyond what may be
necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion,
no using force against or among the people
anywhere.
If you are not convinced Honest Abe as president was
Page 4 The Cerebral Freedom
mainly a skilled politician and liar misremembered to
exploit Honest John, perhaps this excerpt from the same
speech will convince you:
This country, with its institutions, belong to the
people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow
weary of the existing Government, they can exercise
their constitutional right of amending it, or their
revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.
Politicians in their times prefer to whitewash their
predecessors with unquestioning allegiance and ride the
mystic coattails. Sycophantic historians of tenure, so
intent on stroking Abe's ‘mystic chords’, have lionized
Abraham Lincoln as the greatest American President with
respect to goodness and morality. Lincoln was a lawyer
for the railroads, and a check only against Republicans
more radical than he.
Consider the book To Try Men's Souls (1959) by Harold
M. Hyman. In his chapter 6, “The House Divided” we are
told of the ruined newspapers, arrests of the general
public for expression of political support for disunion, and
the takeover of the Maryland Government, a government
that had been moving to secession. We are also told,
“Behind the harshness, Lincoln's mercy palliated the
worst features of the disloyalty prevention program.”
Lincoln, as far as I can tell, never grasped for absolute
personal power, nor did his virtuous moderation afflict his
relentless pursuit of palatable Republican domination over
a maximal tax base. Is a federal government too big to
fail also a defense of liberty?
Hyman's previous chapter, entitled “State against
Nation—1833,” describes the threat of secession by South
Carolina over the ‘tariff of abominations’. Tariffs were
the perennial political issue of 19th-century America. Not
all rich people are satisfied with what they deserve by
their contributions to society. Unscrupulous rich are an
economy's crust, pressuring the rank and file into future
tectonic action if their hot vitality that not only feeds
tyranny but sparks liberty is not to become dead cold.
Hyman tells us what was the ‘dusky motive inspiring
Southern antitariff arguments’ with a quote attributed to
Robert J. Turnbull: “the time approaches when Congress
can take no vote that shall not be an expression on the
subject of slavery.” It so happens that Turnbull was a
Democrat and the U.S. Representative from Charleston,
Virginian. The quote is taken from D. F. Houston, A
Critical Study of Nullification in South Carolina (1896),
p. 50. Houston, in footnote 2 on page 49, attributes the
quote to Turnbull's book The Crisis: or, Essays on the
Usurpations of the Federal Government (1827). No page
for the quote was given and my search using Google
books did not find the quote. The titles of the two
‘sources’ do not mention slavery; they instead refer to
State ‘nullification’ and federal ‘usurpations’.
Volume 1, Number 2
Nullification is a concept that Hamilton virtually
endorsed, it seems as insincere sophistry, to win
ratification of the U.S. Constitution from New York State
if not elsewhere. In Federalist paper number 28 he wrote,
“It may safely be received as an axiom in our political
system, that the State governments will, in all possible
contingencies, afford complete security against invasions
of the public liberty by the national authority.” Excepting
the credit line using the pen name Publius, Hamilton
concluded the same paper:
When will the time arrive that the federal
government can raise and maintain an army capable
of erecting a despotism over the great body of the
people of an immense empire, who are in a situation,
through the medium of their State governments, to
take measures for their own defence, with all celerity,
regularity, and system of independent nations? The
apprehension may be considered as a disease, for
which there can be found no cure in the resources of
argument and reasoning.
Hamilton's vision was nevertheless the creation of an
‘American empire’, though he and other consolidationists
styled themselves as ‘Federalists’. Jefferson's camp
similarly took the identity ‘Republicans’. The Federalists
pejoratively called them Democrats. Protection against
tyranny of the majority was motive for the provision of an
electoral college within the Constitution. The
Republicans defiantly referred to themselves more fully
as ‘Democratic-Republicans’. Party names were
undoubtedly confusing to voters who knew what federal
and republican meant by definition. Obfuscation of the
debatable due process of federal governance is the lasting
upshot. Some Founding Fathers were so-called
antifederalists who prompted the consideration of a Bill of
Rights conducive to ratification of the Constitution to
which it would be appended. The Constitution does not
settle the issue of States' rights. Lincoln and a wholly
different Republican Party did but only with superior
violence. Defense against the tyranny of a stupid majority
requires representative democracy and scrupulous
federalism in tandem, if you know what I mean. If fellow
American you don't, you are part of my problem.
The resultant quality of the union was perverted in
more ways than one. If blacks and whites of the South
would have been left to autonomously arrive at a private
resolution, it would not be today's unresolved cultural
plague of bygone parties, and the United States would
have likely re-formed better than ever. There is a problem
with living memory: it doesn't go back far enough. Most
people learn character from adversity and not by using the
public library. Most people never learn self-governing
without self-directed experiences spanning enough time to
own cause and effect. Without secession the political
December 2009 The Cerebral Freedom
apparatus grinds away individual accountability, just the
way demagogues like it. The historic drama surrounding
the old slave class is used to cloak the existence of the
new slave class, with many members hell bent on no exit
strategy and no individual accountability. But why buy an
American mule when you can rent one in the modern
style?
Fellow Americans, to believe the United States is a
chosen nation is to buy the pleasantry of arrogant
chauvinism at the cost of transferring God's inalienable
rights to a divine secular government. Arrogant
environmentalism, arrogant socialism, etc. are dogmas not
much different. “Rule one: Never allow a crisis to go to
waste,” said Obama's chief of staff Rahm Emanuel shortly
after Obama's presidential election victory. “They are
opportunities to do big things.” The allure of arrogant
grandeur baits a bipartisan net of monolithic federal
nationalism, and many Americans prefer to dismiss all
that individual power and responsibility. Those civic
failures are functionally the friends of the enemies of
themselves and their fellow Americans all lumped
together.
Only disunion might peaceable allow each headstrong
facet of American multiculturalism to reap as it sows, to
mature with its practitioners self-directed experiences of
cause and effect, and to conclusively prove its worth
measured by true life. Only secession may allow capable
Americans to save themselves from the horde of the
incapable. Only just deserts will permit American
heritage to restore itself to standards fit for reality, a
reality all the more technically demanding in the 21st
century. Only competent liberty will permit great culture
because great culture and its society must be pruned and
weeded by great standards. Great physical technology
increasingly loosed by the lagging of social technology
(or roughly common sense) must slash and burn such a
society indiscriminately.
The technicality alone of being American belongs to the
U.S. Federal Government; the spirit of being American
belongs to we the people who are virtuous in our
American heritage. The Pledge as currently formulated
(per 4 U.S.C. 4) is:
I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of
America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one
Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and
justice for all.
The U.S. Federal Government should have allegiance to
the people and their States, nationalism based on
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Page 5
religiosity suffers from the same inadequacy by First
World standards that theocracy does, indivisibility is
subversive to scrupulous federalism and so First World
and free-market principles, and liberty for all is contrary
to justice for all until no one is criminal. Rights and
privileges derive from exactly the same instrument of
enfranchisement to impart some social means, differing
only in the default of actuation. Civic Catholicism is a
secular religion, a propaganda sponsored by elitists for the
exploitation of First World regulars and enshrined by
linguistic constructs comforting to the dull masses.
Cherchez la femme.
Bibliography
Richard J. Ellis, To the Flag: The Unlikely History of the
Pledge of Allegiance (Lawrence, Kansas: University
Press of Kansas, c2005).
Joint Resolution of 22 June 1942, ch. 435; 56 Stat. 377.
Joint Resolution of 14 June 1954, ch. 297; 68 Stat. 249.
Act of 11 July 1955, ch 303; 69 Stat.290.
David W. Lange, History of the United States Mint and Its
Coinage (Atlanta, GA: Whitman Publishing, LLC,
c2005), vide pp. 36–8, 99.
United States Code, Title 4, section 4: normatively cited
as 4 U.S.C. 4.
SFGate Website, www.sfgate.com, Home of the San
Francisco Chronicle, search article database with for
example ‘sex change surgery benefits’.
Jeff Zeleny, “Obama Weighs Quick Undoing of Bush
Policy,” 9 November 2008, accessed 25 August 2009 at
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/10/us/politics
/10obama.html for Rahm's statement.
Alpheus Thomas Mason, The States Rights Debate:
Antifederalism and the Constitution (Englewood Cliffs,
N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1964), vide p. 196 for
Hamilton's intimation of nullification, and p. 4 for
Antifederalists and the Bill of Rights.
Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, The
Federalist, ed. Benjamin Fletcher Wright (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, 1961), vide ‘fabric’, p. 158 (paper
15), and vide ‘fabric of American empire’, p. 199
(paper 22).
Marcus Cunliffe, The Nation Takes Shape: 1789–1837
(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1959), pp.
27–8 for party naming trickery.